Would it not be great if Citeseer was more like Amazon?

Don’t get me wrong I think that Citeseer is an extreamly valuable tool, and I would not like to be without it. I just think that it has potential to be much more useful. Imagine how nice it would be if when you looked at paper you also got a small section “Researchers who found this paper interesting also liked:“. Likewise, it woulde be nice if you could get a page of recommondations after you had browsed around for a while. Of course Amazon has better data because they can more reliably track if people liked an item (if “like” is defined as “bought”:-)), and I don’t have much confidence in rating systems.

While on the subject of search eninges. I’ve played around with Google Scholar. I don’t think it can replace Citeseer, yet, but it is a great supplement. It is also interesting to compare the different results you get from Citeseer and Google Scholar if you feed them the same search phrase. Based on a few tests it looks like Google Scholar is better for finding interesting papers, which you can then feed into Citeseer to get more details. Anyway, I’m looking forward to use Google Scholar in anger for my next paper.